The Death of the Doodle

In my youth, when I wanted to be Angela Lansbury (the Sondheim-singing Angela Lansbury who’d made “The Manchurian Candidate”), I spent two college summers as an apprentice at the Yale Cabaret. It was run by Yale School of Drama students, we used the Drama School shops and the upstairs cabaret in the building on Park Street. It was two and a half months of hard work, almost giving me the illusion that I’d been to the Yale Drama School without the benefit of graduating.

I lived in one sublet apartment or another on the far side of Park Street, so I’d often get breakfast to go or a sandwich at Joe Gag’s, the greasy spoon on the corner of Park and Chapel Streets (I think it was the corner, or was that the greengrocer’s?). But backup breakfast place, or breakfast if I had to be in the Drama School proper I always got from Yankee Doodle. It had a really great red, white and blue sign above the door, with an artist’s rendering of Yankee Doodle.

But 58 years after it opened, the rent’s gone up so high, the Beckwith family can’t afford it anymore. Monday was the Doodle’s last day.